Iliana Limón Romero named deputy sports editor of The Times

Sent on behalf of executive sports editor Chris Stone:

I am thrilled to announce that Iliana Limón Romero is joining the Los Angeles Times as deputy sports editor.

Romero has been sports editor at the Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel since 2018, and her team has won more than a dozen Associated Press Sports Editors awards for its website, special sections, features and project reporting since she joined the Sentinel’s editing staff in 2012. In 2016, while assistant sports editor at the Sentinel, she and her reporters joined in the newsroom’s coverage of the Pulse nightclub shooting, and she handled many of the Spanish-language interviews. That coverage was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in breaking news.

At the Sentinel, she developed a national reputation for her mentoring work in the newsroom as well as with the National Assn. of Hispanic Journalists and the Assn. for Women in Sports Media. She is the NAHJ Central Florida chapter president and leader of the NAHJ Sports Task Force. In 2020, she earned the NAHJ’s Dale Award for “going above and beyond to assure fair and accurate representation of Latinos in news.”

Romero grew up in El Paso and spent her summers visiting family in Torreón, Mexico, where her family owned the daily newspaper, La Opinión. “I was in second grade when they took my cousins and I on a tour of the paper,” she said. “I loved everything about it, especially watching the presses run.”

The family subscribed to both El Paso daily newspapers. Her mother, Lily, a high school principal, told her the story of a reporter from El Paso who had worked at the city’s Herald-Post before moving on to the Los Angeles Times. That reporter was Ruben Salazar, who was killed while covering the national Chicano Moratorium march. Six years ago, as a member of El Paso’s City Council, Lily Limón introduced a proposal to name a stretch of the border highway after Salazar. The proposal failed, but the efforts to find more ways to honor him continue.

Though Romero grew up in a state that reveres the Dallas Cowboys and Texas Longhorns, the Limón family living room was Dodgers and Lakers country, as El Paso was served by Los Angeles network TV affiliates. She grew up watching Dodgers games with her grandfather on KTLA. Her sister’s godfather had a dog named Sandy in honor of his favorite Dodgers pitcher.

Romero began her career on the metro desk at the Albuquerque Tribune. Her most memorable project was an investigation into the proliferation of home methamphetamine labs in the city’s more affluent areas, a trend later highlighted in the series “Breaking Bad.” She also covered more than 200 homicides until the college football beat reporter quit two weeks before preseason camp in 2004. She made the jump to sports and has remained there since.

“I could not be more excited about joining the exceptional Los Angeles Times sports department,” she said. “It’s a dream job with seemingly endless possibilities for creative storytelling in all forms.”